LOST Media Mentions - DarkUFO

Namaste!

Welcome to LOST Media Media Mentions
This part of the site contained articls relating to LOST and the Cast/Crew being mentioned in the media.

Now that Lost is long gone unfortunately, we've decided that this part of the site will no longer be updated. However, all posts that would have been posted here will be posted here on the main Homepage. All existing content will remain as it is.

OK, final day in my weeklong mailbag in which I answer your burning "Lost" questions about the game-changing finale. Today, we only have one question, but probably the one on most of your minds.

What do you think the shape of Season 6 to come will look like, based on what went down (or didn't) in "The Incident"?Other Sean

Yup, this is the doozy, all right. After Season 1, we knew we were going down into the hatch. After Season 2, we were heading to the Others’ home. After Season 3, we knew that it was a mistake for certain people to leave the Island. After Season 4, we knew they had to return. But after Season 5? That fade to white has us baffled. Where do we go from here?

The paths are many, but luckily finite. To start with, we have to look at the two main branches, based in Juliet’s actions at the end of the episode. Some think that Jughead never went off, but would they spend a season introducing its detonation as the way out of a timeloop and then NOT blow it up? Wouldn't that massively annoy the majority of fans? It would annoy me. With that in mind, the two branches:1. Jughead detonated, killing everyone in the vicinity. Juliet, Jack, and everyone else within a decent radius died instantaneously.2. Jughead detonated, but rather than killing everyone, sent those within the radius to some other place and/or time.

Option #1 would be bold as hell, as it would imply that we’re left with just those in 2007 for Season 6. Not only was Locke a patsy of The Man in Black/Randall Flagg’s machinations, but so were all Lostaways/Freighter Folk in 1977. So, we’d be left with Sun, Richard, Ben, and Ilana’s crew against notLocke/UnLocke/BetaLocke/whatever we’re calling Randall-as-Locke these days. As a Def Leppard fan, I wanna call him “Locke of Ages” but somehow I doubt that will stick.

But while bold, Option #1 seems a bit farfetched, to say the least. So, we’re left with Option #2, which breaks down in my eyes to four main variations.1. Several, if not all, of those in the vicinity of the explosion at the Swan are sent to the Island in 2007 immediately after Jacob is apparently killed under the statue.2. Those at the Swan return to the crash site on September 22, 2004, with the memories of the past three years of their lives intact.3. Those touched by Jacob throughout their lives return to the moment in which he touched them.4. Faraday’s theory is actually correct, and Oceanic 815 lands in Los Angeles without problem.

I ordered those from my personal take on likeliness of occurring. The first is the simplest, from the perspective of a show that has 17 hours to wrap up its endgame, but I wouldn’t put it past the show to attempt the latter three as well. I would be slightly terrified if they did, as they spent too long in Season 5 untangling the end of Season 4 and would have an even harder time come Season 6. Doesn’t mean they couldn’t pull it off, but then again, after Jack’s “I’m going to blow up the Island so I have a shot at Kate again,” I’m moving towards the skeptical column when it comes to narrative Hail Marys.

To understand the shape of Season 6 is to understand the reason Jacob visited certain people at certain times of their lives, as well as the importance of touching them during these visits. The show’s constant use of the word “destiny” has always bugged me on a small level, as I’m a fan of personal choice and agency informing the ultimate outcomes of a life. But Jacob’s touches rectify that problem for me: by touching them, Jacob is identifying their potential, not dictating their actions. And so we have a nice marriage of fate and autonomy.

It seems, on a basic level, that in touching these people, Jacob was preparing them for something. But is that something in their past or in their future? By that I mean: did he touch them so, when landing upon the Island, they would choose to do X, only to watch them choose Y instead? If so, then Season 6 is about sending them back to the point at which they failed. That yields Options 2-4, with the middle two suggesting they return to a specific point with accumulated knowledge in the hopes that the 2nd time through they would get it right. Option #4 in this case suggests a nagging doubt amongst a group of now strangers that something is amiss after landing in LAX.

But if that’s not the case, then touching them at points in their past was all part of a plan to counter everything done by Randall in order to upset the balance on the Island. In the coming weeks, I’ll be looking at the few first seasons of “Lost” as a stalemate between Jacob and Randall, with the push/pull between them yielding a standstill only broken in “The Man Behind the Curtain.” But if Randall turned the tide in that episode, then Jacob perhaps looked past his enemy’s endgame long ago in order to get the proper people in the proper place at the proper time. And those people just so happened to be at the Swan Station in July, 1977.

And the scenario in the previous paragraph suggests Option 1, which nicely ties into the apparent theme of Season 6: “Destiny Found.” (Wasn’t it in the Halliburton case, next to the toy plane?) While the thoughts of the show circling back on itself, all Ouroboros-like, is fun to contemplate. But rather than look at like as if another version of Eloise’s brooch in “Flashes Before Your Eyes,” let’s look at Season 6 for what I think it is: the break from the cycle. Just as the circle of ash around the cabin has been broken, so too has the time loop enveloping both the show and its narrative. Rather than return to the past, I think the show’s going to push on into the future.

And whatever happens, will happen. Not because Jacob has pre-ordained it, but because he’s given specific people a tool to enable them to accomplish it.